The Museum of Literary Souls

CHAPTER TEN

They sat in the gentleman’s living room, drinking tea from china cups and eating some fruitcake that he kept in a tin. A fire had been lit, and a lamp burned in a corner. The walls were decorated with oils and watercolors, all of them very fine and very old. The style of a number of them was familiar to Mr. Berger. He wouldn’t have liked to swear upon it, but he was fairly sure that there was at least one Turner, a Constable, and two Romneys — a portrait and a landscape — among their number.

The old gentleman had introduced himself as Mr. Gedeon, and he had been the librarian at the Caxton for more than forty years. His job, he informed Mr. Berger, was “to maintain and, as required, increase the collection; to perform restorative work on the volumes where necessary; and, of course, to look after the characters.”

It was this last phrase that made Mr. Berger choke slightly on his tea.

“The characters?” he said.

“The characters,” confirmed Mr. Gedeon.

“What characters?”

“The characters from the novels.”

“You mean they’re alive?”

Mr. Berger was beginning to wonder not only about his own sanity but that of Mr. Gedeon as well. He felt as though he had wandered into some strange bibliophilic nightmare. He kept hoping that he would wake up at home with a headache to find that he had been inhaling gum from one of his own volumes.

“You saw one of them,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“Well, I saw someone,” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, I’ve seen chaps dressed up as Napoleon at parties, but I didn’t go home thinking I’d met Napoleon.”

“We don’t have Napoleon,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“No?”

“No. Only fictional characters here. It gets a little complicated with Shakespeare, I must admit. That’s caused us some problems. The rules aren’t hard and fast. If they were, this whole business would run a lot more smoothly. But then, literature isn’t a matter of rules, is it? Think how dull it would be if it was, eh?”

Mr. Berger peered into his teacup, as though expecting the arrangement of the leaves to reveal the truth of things. When they did not, he put the cup down, clasped his hands, and resigned himself to whatever was to come.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me about the characters…”

It was, said Mr. Gedeon, all to do with the public. At some point certain characters became so familiar to readers — and, indeed, to many nonreaders — that they reached a state of existence independent of the page.

“Take Oliver Twist, for example,” said Mr. Gedeon. “More people know of Oliver Twist than have ever read the work to which he gave his name. The same is true for Romeo and Juliet, and Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote. Mention their names to the even averagely educated man or woman on the street and, regardless of whether they’ve ever encountered a word of the texts in question, they’ll be able to tell you that Romeo and Juliet were doomed lovers, that Robinson Crusoe was marooned on an island, and Don Quixote was involved in some business with windmills. Similarly, they’ll tell you that Macbeth got above himself, that Ebenezer Scrooge came right in the end, and that D’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos were the names of the musketeers.

“Admittedly, there’s a limit to the number of those who achieve that kind of familiarity. They end up here as a matter of course. But you’d be surprised by how many people can tell you something of Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones or Jay Gatsby. I’m not sure where the point of crossover is, to be perfectly honest. All I know is that at some point a character becomes sufficiently famous to pop into existence, and when they do so they materialize in or near Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository. They always have, ever since the original Mr. Caxton set up the first depository shortly before his death in 1492. According to the history of the library, he did so when some of Chaucer’s pilgrims turned up on his doorstep in 1477.”

“Some of them?” said Mr. Berger. “Not all?”

“Nobody remembers all of them,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Caxton found the Miller, the Reeve, the Knight, the Second Nun, and the Wife of Bath all arguing in his yard. Once he became convinced that they were not actors or lunatics, he realized that he had to find somewhere to keep them. He didn’t want to be accused of sorcery or any other such nonsense, and he had his enemies: where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside the lovers of them.

“So Caxton found a house in the country for them, and this also served as a library for parts of his own collection. He even established a means of continuing to fund the library after he was gone, one that continues to be used to this day. Basically, we mark up what should be marked down and mark down what should be marked up, and the difference is deposited with the Trust.”

“I’m not sure that I understand,” said Mr. Berger.

“It’s simple, really. It’s all to do with ha’pennys and portions of cents or lire, or whatever the currency may be. If, say, a writer was due to be paid the sum of nine pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence ha’penny in royalties, the ha’penny would be shaved off and given to us. Similarly, if a company owes a publisher seventeen pounds, eight shillings, and sevenpence ha’penny, they’re charged eightpence instead. This goes on all through the industry, even down to individual books sold. Sometimes we’re dealing in only fractions of a penny, but when we take them from all round the world and add them together, it’s more than enough to fund the Trust, maintain the library, and house the characters here. It’s now so embedded in the system of books and publishing that nobody even notices anymore.”

Mr. Berger was troubled. He would have had no time for such accounting chicanery when it came to the Closed Accounts Register. It did make sense, though.

“And what is the Trust?”

“Oh, the Trust is just a name that’s used for convenience. There hasn’t been an actual trust in years, or not one on which anyone sits. For all intents and purposes, this is the Trust. I am the Trust. When I pass on, the next librarian will be the Trust. There’s not much work to it. I rarely even have to sign checks.”

While the financial support structure for the library was all very interesting, Mr. Berger was more interested in the question of the characters.

“To get back to these characters, they live here?”

“Oh, absolutely. As I explained, they just show up outside when the time is right. Some are obviously a little confused, but it all becomes clear to them in the days that follow, and they start settling in. And when they arrive, so too does a first edition of the relevant work, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. We put it on a shelf and keep it nice and safe. It’s their life story, and it has to be preserved. Their history is fixed in those pages.”

“What happens with series characters?” asked Mr. Berger. “Sherlock Holmes, for example? Er, I’m assuming he’s here somewhere.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Gedeon. “We numbered his rooms as 221B, just to make him feel at home. Dr. Watson lives next door. In their case, I do believe that the library received an entire collection of first editions of the canonical works.”

“The Conan Doyle books, you mean?”

“Yes. Nothing after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 actually counts. It’s the same for all of the iconic characters here. Once the original creator passes on, then that’s the end of their story as far as we, and they, are concerned. Books by other authors who take up the characters don’t count. It would all be unmanageable otherwise. Needless to say, they don’t show up here until after their creators have died. Until then, they’re still open to change.”

“I’m finding all of this extremely difficult to take in,” said Mr. Berger.

“Dear fellow,” said Mr. Gedeon, leaning over and patting Mr. Berger’s arm reassuringly, “don’t imagine for a moment that you’re the first. I felt exactly the same way the first time that I came here.”

“How did you come here?”

“I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop,” said Mr. Gedeon. “He’d been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn’t taken any of them. It’s to be expected, I suppose. It’s in his nature.”

“So what did you do?”

“I got talking to him, although he does tend to soliloquize, so one has to be patient. Saying it aloud, I suppose it seems nonsensical in retrospect that I wouldn’t simply have called the police and told them that a disturbed person who was under the impression he was Hamlet was marooned at the 48B bus stop. But I’ve always loved Shakespeare, you see, and I found the man at the bus stop quite fascinating. By the time he’d finished speaking, I was convinced. I brought him back here and restored him to the safe care of the librarian of the day. That was old Headley, my predecessor. I had a cup of tea with him, much as we’re doing now, and that was the start of it. When Headley retired, I took his place. Simple as that.”

It didn’t strike Mr. Berger as very simple at all. It seemed complicated on a quite cosmic scale.

“Could I…?” Mr. Berger began to say, then stopped. It struck him as a most extraordinary thing to ask, and he wasn’t sure that he should.

“See them?” said Mr. Gedeon. “By all means! Best bring your coat, though. I find it can get a bit chilly back there.”

Mr. Berger did as he was told. He put on his coat and followed Mr. Gedeon past the shelves, his eyes taking in the titles as he went. He wanted to touch the books, to take them down and stroke them like cats, but he controlled the urge. After all, if Mr. Gedeon was to be believed, he was about to have a far more extraordinary encounter with the world of books.